Jeanne Heuving's INcapacity

book review

In Jeanne Heuving's Incapacity...

In Jeanne Heuving’s Incapacity, a captivating collection of hybrid texts, the dream of language roots and grows, forming multiple trajectories of thought and desire. Like a precarious high wire act, writing moves away from and toward catastrophe. Indeed, in Heuving’s book, the act of telling is constantly threatened by disruptive forces (earthquake, lightning, neurological seizure); even the erotic raptures of climax can signal disaster. Writing enacts possibility just as it dissolves in expiration. For Heuving, every utterance contains the germ of its own potential as well as its collapse.

Incapacity is structured as a collection of notes and drafts about another book titled, Offering. Six long pieces, ranging from lyrical meditations to palimpsests, blend poetry and prose into a kaleidoscopic exploration of being-in-writing. A text within a text, Offering begins “enshrouded in mist” and in the end, is never completed. In “Daybooks,” Heuving writes:

I have been motivated to get at something that cannot be got at through the retelling of sensuous events. I am not sure what it is: perhaps the non-experience of my experience: unreality: the kernel of despair that riddles my heart on even the most joyous days in the most pleasant surroundings. I want this negativism to pervade the entire piece and so have not allowed myself to sink into an event and render it imaginatively. But perhaps I have been confusing the telling with the subject and unable to get at my subject founder in my telling of it.

The result of this failed experiment is Incapacity, a book that contains the fragile and occasionally lucid thought-traces of a writer attempting to render the negative center of her experience.

Heuving’s project is a difficult one. How does one convey the “negativism” of experience—or any experience—without relying on sensual details and narrative structure? How does one convey in writing the “unreality” of an experience and render that “kernel of despair” that can pervade and infect a life and for which there is no adequate vocabulary? Perhaps a solution is to create a snowball effect: layer upon layer of words written on “snowy paper” that coalesce and harden meaningfully. However, like the fatal snowball in Jean Cocteau’s film, Les Enfants Terribles, you may “discover yourself in the snowball—the rock at the center—when it hits Paul.”

In “Snowball,” Heuving discusses a scene from Cocteau’s film in which the beating of Paul’s heart grows increasingly louder inside a windowless room. This heartbeat, she writes, symbolizes the “doubly directed narrative that would seem to wish to draw us into its empty center, as it pushes us ever outward to the edges of a gray lapping sea.” This “doubly directed narrative” is also apparent throughout Incapacity. The shift from the center (subjective) to the edge (objective) allows the self or the event to be observed from a distance and therefore its deadness, its paralyzing passivity, is more easily perceived.

Throughout Incapacity, the relationship between writing and self-destruction pivots around some kind of structural void—a room, a house, a cave—afloat in a sea of unknowns. The reader is taken along on dream-like excursions into a “beautiful mist,” which upon clearing reveals lush, tropical landscapes and snowy mountain ranges threatened or marred by devastating tectonic forces. Heuving writes: “It was so extraordinarily beautiful to be alive in a tropical country when it was breaking apart. She never expected anything so lush to fall apart at the center.” Again, the event of writing self-destructs with a kind of beautiful inevitability. Like the breaking apart of a country. Or the dissipation of mist. Or the melting of snow.

Incapacity is an intelligent work. Spiritually probing and intimate, Heuving explores the dialectical tension between language and experience, subjectivity and objectivity, longing and loss. Each page serves as a scrim through which powerful subterranean forces are “dimly perceived,” reminding the reader to be/ware of her own precarious relation to events that occur in time. For here, no one is safe. Each unfolding moment is filled with potential, like a “small box with magnetic powers.” Open carefully. Incapacity is a magnetic book.

Originally published in Tinfish Journal, 2004. Purchase a copy of this book here.